JPEG

Canon PowerShot models store their image sequence numbers in the Exif data, so using a program that can dump Exif data to text like jhead, and the following Perl script, you can essentially restore all the JPG files to their original names. --Vees 01:59, 8 January 2007 (CET)

The following command recreates the original directory layout and file names present on the card (for Canon cameras, tested with numerous photos from an EOS 20D), using the file number EXIF info. ExifTool works under both Windows and Linux.

exiftool -r "-FileName<IMG_${FileIndex}%c.%e" DIR

It uses FileIndex from EXIF information in file to rename to original filename, the %c is checking for duplicate names and appends other digit to the name. And it works recursively (-r).

Issue the following command using Exiv2 to rename all JPEGs to their respective date (the program will ask what to do if conflicts occur):

$ exiv2 -t rename *.jpg

When using the above exiv2 renaming and you have multiple thousands of files to rename, some shells might issue an error like "Argument list too long". In that case, use the following workaround:

$ find ./ -exec exiv2 -t rename {} \;

In those cases, in which the number of files is very large, specifying a default action, e.g. always rename duplicates (-F) seems advisable:

$ find ./ -exec exiv2 -F -t rename {} \;

Finding duplicate

FSlint Duplicate file finder for Linux (very simple to handle, includes a GUI)

Under Linux or Mac OS X (or with perl and 'sum'), you can find duplicates in a hierarchy using find_dup.

Under Linux or Mac OSX, md5sum can used to find duplicate files (maybe just md5'ing only the first x bytes).

MP3, mp4, Ogg vorbis...

Most mp3, mp4 and ogg files have embedded information about Title, Album and Author. You can use EasyTag to automatically rename the recovered audios and videos using this information.

MS Office

To read a broken MS Office document (doc/xls/ppt/...) that MS Office could not read, you can try OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.

Some MS Office documents (xls/ppt/...) may be recovered with a Word .doc extension - you may need to rename these files.